Digital technology is making it possible for publishers and libraries to gather data on the dissemination and use of scholarly publications in unprecedented detail and on an unprecedented scale. While data arising from the digital distribution of content provides new opportunities for understanding the scholarly communication ecosystem, it also creates socio-technical challenges for understanding how scholarly content is shared and used across networked knowledge landscapes. Libraries and institutions will require the context that aggregate data can provide to effectively use the data they collect, but they will be unable to create this context alone. This risks leaving the collection of data in the hands of a small number of well-resourced organizations—likely commercial—that do not answer to the community. The proposed Publishing Analytics Data Alliance will serve as a cooperative in which representatives from all of the relevant academic publishing stakeholder groups (academic publishers, research libraries, research centers, and aggregators) collaborate to address the socio-technical challenges around publishing analytics: developing a data model, workflows, and prototype for aggregation and display of usage data relating to digital monographs, and creating an accompanying code of ethics and terms of use for data gathering, analysis, and dissemination by members.

Paper for an invited presentation at a 2015 meeting of the Southwest Area Theological Library Association (SWATLA). This paper discusses rethinking how we pay for scholarly monographs.